No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

When had she decided that it was better to be miserable than to be alone, she wondered. Or had that always been the price she was paying?

Nathan seems like an absolutely awful, gaslighting, piece of shit.

He didn’t say anything. But the next day he asked her to bring him one of his guns, saying he needed to clean it, and then he spun the cylinder and sighted casually down the barrel at her and mentioned, as if out of nowhere, that he’d rather his daughters be dead than be whores. Three weeks later she went out again with the same boy and she leaned his car seat back and fucked him in the parking lot behind the gas station, all of their clothes still on. She’d always assumed it would hurt, but it didn’t. She didn’t even bleed.

How utterly unlikely was it that one of those awful things she had imagined so many times would actually come true? But she had always known they could.